Bad Boy

MEMOIRS OF THE NOTORIOUS STEPHEN BURROUGHS--Dial Press ($4.00). The serviceable custodian of New England's fame, Poet Robert Frost, has called attention to Stephen Burroughs, contemporary of Aaron Burr, whose transgressions, if not in the grand manner of a national betrayal, were much more profuse and persistent than those with which Burr is credited.

Just too young to sublimate his youthful ardors in the melee for Liberty, Stephen Burroughs, hulking son of a Hanover, N. H., clergyman, boiled up beneath his Presbyterian upbringing and over into melon-snitching, horse-borrowing, neighbor-baiting pestiferation that earned him many beatings and an early discharge from Dartmouth College. Posturing as a ship's doctor, he went off to sea. A sharp, overweening tongue landed him in irons, foolish but innocent. At home again, penniless, he calculated his next plan for a career more thoughtfully. He stole some of his father's sermons and marched off under an assumed name looking for an empty pulpit. With admirable casuistry, he told himself that, since men liked to be preached to, it mattered not who preached, so long as the hearers were none the wiser. When his reputation chased him from one pulpit to another, he found reasons for taking up counterfeiting: men had to have currency and he a living. Why, he would do mankind a service and after he had got rich, succor the poor! But his first bad dollars bought him a cell; and for several years he had to concentrate on breaking jail.

Somewhat penitent, he turned his hand to school-teaching and minor peculations, then lived a while with his father. The strain of this hypocrisy was too great, however. Soon he was off to Canada, where he established a most profitable counterfeiting establishment beyond reach of the U. S. law. That he wound up in the Catholic Church argues, perhaps, a retarded outcropping of his Puritanical upbringing ; perhaps one last hypocrisy to ensure comfort in old age. The rhetorical, mock-modest manner of his memoirs, which he published to a wide audience in 1811, indicate the complete hypocrite --a varlet of guile and gusto to whom a naive generation quite naturally credited unnatural sins and the comradeship of Satan. Poet Frost, in a preface to the reissued memoirs, would place Burroughs beside Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin to complete the evidence that our young country grew all kinds of fine flowers.